Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

31. Change the direction of the gradient to vertical. Press

the G key to switch to the gradient tool. Illustrator will

display a horizontal gradient annotator in the document

window. Now draw a vertical line (press the Shift key

as you do) from Sam’s elbow down to the bottom of the

white edge of the keyboard. The aftermath, complete

with annotator and fading piano, appears in Figure 8-27.

32. Save your changes. Press the V key to select the black

arrow tool. Switch back to the Transparency panel and

click the fi rst thumbnail, the one that looks like the

spine of a piano, to return focus to the illustration. Press

Ctrl+Shift+A (-Shift-A) to deselect everything. And then

choose File→Save As or press Ctrl+Shift+S (-Shift-S) to

save your most recent changes without overwriting your

last ones. Name this fi le “Opacity masks fi nal.ai,” and

click the Save button.

Opacity masks permit you to employ any of Illustrator’s tools

in the name of modifying the transparency of a path, group,

blend, or layer. Use the blob brush to paint holes. Use gra-

dients and blends to produce soft transitions. You can even

use editable text to cut character-shaped holes or house ob-

jects inside letters. Opacity masks are beyond PostScript,

but they’re well within PDF and as fl exible as the day is long.

Applying Blend Modes

Witnessed back in Figure 8-1 (page 243), blend modes are

methods for mixing colors with more fl exibility than is af-

forded by a straight Opacity blend. To get a sense of just how

much you can do with them, imagine that you’re mixing two

pigments—traditional paints, for example—to create a new

color. And in addition to deciding how much of each pig-

ment to mix, the equivalent of an Opacity adjustment, you

can also tweak the chemical reaction so that the mix darkens

the pigments, lightens them, increases the color’s intensity,

or even reverses the pigments entirely.

Illustrator’s sixteen blend modes vary wildly in their utility.

We’ll focus on the most essential. As illustrated in Figure 8-28,

such modes as Multiply, Screen, Color, and Luminosity allow

you to use a path or other object to darken, lighten, color-

ize, or shade, respectively, the objects behind it. (The Nor-

mal setting is the equivalent of turning off the blend mode.)

Figure 8-27 .

Figure 8-28 .

No blend mode

Universally darkens

Lightens on ink-by-ink basis

Colorizes background objects

Blends shades with background colors

260

Lesson 8: Working with Transparency